M4 Mac mini review

This is my review and thoughts on my new M4 Mac mini - along with the current State of My Macintosh and my other Apple appliances. I’ve been using Macs since 1984 and the 128k MacPlus. I’ve gotten paid to manage Macs since 1988 when I ran all the student Mac labs – equipped with dual floppy Mac Pluses that we used to run Word off hard drives a Novell Network. One floppy was the MacOS/Novell and the other was your files.

I’ve been reading your stuff forever pretty much. Since Eudora and Gopher? I used to frequent alt.dead.net newsgroup back in the day with some kind of gui. Was that Eudora too?

Anyway…

I was the MacMeister at Drake University in the 1990’s - it was a Big Mac shop. All faculty and staff had them along with the Mac In The Residence Hall program where every double room had a Mac hooked up to an AppleTalk network. I ran the student labs and provided desktop support for everyone from the University President on down for some 5000 users.

Then we took delivery of 1000 PowerMac 7100’s when they first came out. We needed new Macs and Apple wanted to report large sales. So we made a deal. I still remember President Ferrari cutting the seal off the 18 wheeler trailer - full of brand new 7100s and monitors (Trinitrons - hell yes!). I earned myself a mug from Mac The Knife in Mac Week for reporting the well publicized 7100 delivery and my speculation that Apple gave us a good deal so they could book the big sale and tell the world “oh, yes! We are shipping lots of PowerMacs!” No confidences were breached. I had no knowledge of what they actually sold them to us for. But I knew they Apple Ed Rep guys really well - nice folks. And the one sales guy was a real closer.

I think I’ve had 5 or 6 Apple Macintosh computers over the years. I had a Iici. Then I was waiting on the video production version of the 8100 - which was delayed forever. So I picked up a Power Computing equivalent machine. Mac clones. How weird was that? Wasn’t that Michael “The Diesel” Gerstner’s idea? I got an original Bondi Blue iMac for my mom. I had a some kind of tower blue Mac Pro. And one of those aluminum mesh bodied Mac Pros with the two drive doors that were out before the black “ash can” Mac Pro replaced it. That was my last actual Apple Mac until the M4 Mac mini I just picked up.

Oh yeah - I had a Newton 120. I was gun shy on early adoption and passed on the 100 and 110. I never really used it that much.

I left Drake in 2000. I’ve always been a cheap SOB so I started building Hackintosh towers with gaming capability. I set them up to boot into their own drive for Windows so I could play a few games on it like DCS World (digital combat simulation - very high-end A-10 simulator). Hackintoshes are a total pain in the ass. You wind up getting all too familiar with 600 lines of UNIX code for the boot loader for the MacOS. But you get a lot of GPU, CPU and storage options on really nice mother boards.

I really think the Hackintosh community is responsible for the Mac Pro and its options. And the mid-level Studio.

I once got the Mac OS almost totally working on a Dell Lattitude laptop - but the gpu was unsupported so no YouTube video.

I built like five Hackintosh towers - getting a new one every two years or so with a really good Intel CPU and 32 gigs or RAM and a good ($250-$300) GPU. Then sell the old one on eBay.

I stopped playing PC games a year or two ago. Just lost interest. And I needed a new computer so I have been eyeballing the Mac Studio for some time thinking I would wait to pick one up when they start shipping M4 iron. But I recently did a little more due diligence comparing the Mac Studio to the new M4 Mac mini. It seems the big advantage to the Mac Studio is the video processing power. More monitors supported with better video crunching capability. I do produce just a little video. I am a vinyl DJ and one of my turn tables got dropped on its lid (high wind event outdoors). There was no YouTube video on how to replace that motor in that turntable. So I made one with my iPhone. https://youtu.be/5qFlpIKZcfo?si=8ER2PpZPSG_BFabu

Bottom line is I’m only using 2 monitors now and wouldn’t really utilize the video GPU capabilities of the Mac Studio. The Studio’s marginal improvement in CPU threads and cores and such just isn’t worth the price difference between the $800 M4 Mac mini and the nascent M4 Mac Studio at $2000 on up.

So I took the plunge and went out to the Apple Store in West Des Moines and had a great experience BSing with the sales guy and telling him my war stories from the Mac trenches. I got the $800 16GB M4 Mac mini.

Performance is great. Couple of persistent OS bugs that I have noticed for several years in the Mac OS. But I’m really, really, really super happy!!!

The 512GB of storage isn’t a problem as I have a OWC Mercury Elite Quad USB C box with four 10TB drives in it. 2 main data and video / audio drives and 2 backups. I just move stuff off the Mac mini onto one of the external drives.

I was worried the 16GB RAM built into the M4 Mini would be a problem. But the Mac OS seems to manage the memory really well. I have not encountered a low memory warning yet. I’ve been eyeballing memory usage in Activity Monitor and there always seems to be a good 4GB of the 16 free.

The one Apple thing I did ditch was the Apple TV set top box. And I had the latest $100 version. It doesn’t really do anything special. Especially for the money. Amazon was giving 4k FIreSticks away for $22 on Black Friday. I now own a FireStick and hook it up to the living room TV. Maybe Apple will do something interesting with the rumored new version of the Apple TV. Let’s hope.

Here’s what I do with my Mac:

Safari is my main web browser as I also have an iPhone 14 Pro Max and an iPad Pro and Apple Watch Ultra. Safari just works seamlessly across my devices.

Apple Mail. Most folks don’t even know how useful an actual email client application is as they get their email in a browser. And I’ve been using email clients since Eudora.

Podcasts. I listen to tons of podcasts in the car and elsewhere.

VLC Player to watch movies.

ISuperDuper for backups

DriveDX disk monitor

RapidWeaver web site builder

Clean My Mac has been handy for finding duplicate files and such

Avast One suite for virus protection and such.

Music - I have all the LPs I have on Vinyl in it. When I go to the Y for my cardio - I listen to whole albums start to finish (as the artist intended - sheesh I am a vinyl snob) 8-)>. I keep the 1400 songs or so I have in my Excel database in a Vinyl Set Playlist. I have a BlueTooth JVC head that I play my iPhone through.

Algoriddim DJ Pro. I use it for a backup for my Vinyl turntable rig. If all else fails - I can do a show from my iPad Pro. I also have about 900 MTV type music videos and do an 80’s video show at clubs. They fixed the aspect ratio issue a couple of releases ago and now it’s just great for Video DJ gigs. I also use it to analyze songs I pick out from my vinyl catalog for tempo and key. I hand-rolled a database in Excel that has all the songs I like off of the 400 or so LPs I tote with me (like 3 or 4 for most LPs). It has about 1400 songs I can then sort by key or tempo (or artist or title). I just have the iPad Pro handy and use it at my gigs. Back in the day - vinyl DJ’s would time out the temp themselves and then write it in Sharpie on the record jacket along with the key.

MediaHuman Audio Converter to convert FLAC files and such so I can import them into Apple Music.

Nord VPN

OnyX utility - handy for resetting permissions.

Microsoft Office. Microsoft’s dirty little secret is the Mac OS version of Office is just way better than the Windows version. I like my menus, thank you!

Apple Photos. I have scans starting in ’94. Now I use the 14 Pro Max for all my photography and video. I had a series of top-of-the-line point and shoot digital cameras with nice zoom lenses on them. But the iPhone is just a great camera - and maybe the best video camera. And I don’t have to tote around another device when I go to Riot Fest in Chicago to see The Cure or something…

I pay Apple for 2 TB of iCloud storage. I keep all documents I originate or need on there. And photos. And Music. I advise everyone to keep their documents in the cloud. Then they can’t burn up in a fire or be stolen.

I fool around with Garage Band a bit. I use loops to make original music for my videos so I don’t run afoul of copyright on YouTube when I post them there.

I like the new Passwords app. Especially because it is the same on my 14 Pro Max and iPad Pro.

I like the company. Cool new HQ building. Tim Cook seems to be just the right guy at the right time. (Too bad he didn’t bring his husband to the inauguration). I really appreciate that PRIVACY is a big part of the Apple brand. I always used to bitch about folks using Gmail when I worked in insurance. It’s not secure. Google scrapes everything - mostly in an attempt to sell you shoes - but still…. I use iCloud for my mail.

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Nice work! Great overview of what you’ve got and use.

Agree re Cook being the right man at the right time, and ‘twas good to see him not playing the ‘tech bro look at me’ game at the inauguration.

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